It turns out that looping_call does check the deferred returned by its
callback, and (at least in the case of client_ips), we were relying on this,
and I broke it in #3604.
Update run_as_background_process to return the deferred, and make sure we
return it to clock.looping_call.
While I was going through uses of preserve_fn for other PRs, I converted places
which only use the wrapped function once to use run_in_background, to avoid
creating the function object.
There were a bunch of places where we fire off a process to happen in the
background, but don't have any exception handling on it - instead relying on
the unhandled error being logged when the relevent deferred gets
garbage-collected.
This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
- logging on garbage collection is best-effort and may happen some time after
the error, if at all
- it can be hard to figure out where the error actually happened.
- it is logged as a scary CRITICAL error which (a) I always forget to grep for
and (b) it's not really CRITICAL if a background process we don't care about
fails.
So this is an attempt to add exception handling to everything we fire off into
the background.
Richard van der Hoff